


Seeking the Seekers: A close-reading of the Nameless Doctor's Letters, 1898-1899

by deepandlovelydark



Series: Ecstasy in Cosmogone [9]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Invented Academic Thesis, Pseudo-History, Regeneration, Research, Seeking Mr Eaten's Name, general Neathy weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 08:59:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12362235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepandlovelydark/pseuds/deepandlovelydark
Summary: East Anglia, 1992. Red-pen comments on a first draft of the Sprightly Angler's undergraduate thesis."Cheerful topic you've picked, isn't it? Cannibalism and madness?""Well. Sounded more cheerful than an analysis of the late-reign mayoral elections..."





	Seeking the Seekers: A close-reading of the Nameless Doctor's Letters, 1898-1899

**Author's Note:**

> This one was written entirely for my own amusement. 
> 
> Briefly, however: the background to this is a canon-divergent tale of the Twelfth Doctor - instead of returning to Gallifrey after the events of "Heaven Sent," he made his way to the Neath instead. It'd take place a few years after the events of "Fulgent Engineering" and "Sunless Sea".
> 
> One of these days, I may actually do that source text... 
> 
> Copyright notes: Fallen London is © 2015 and ™ Failbetter Games Limited: www.fallenlondon.com. This is an unofficial fan work. Doctor Who belongs to the BBC.

Working title - Exegesis Rising: A Tale of a Nameless Doctor

_No, no, decorum must be maintained. Drain all personality from your title. No professor will thank you for requiring them to compliment a thesis that sounds like an airport novel._

Dedicated to __, my mentor, without whom I could never have approached this task of scholarship. Quite literally. 

_You flatter me somewhat. Any tutor could have provided you with cosmogone spectacles; you were the one who put them to use in the irrigo archive. You’re still only my third student to venture in. And the first to come back without having gone mad._

_Not that this will make me go any more lightly on your prose, mind you._

I. ”We are all Victorians still."

The popular expression continues to ring true. More than a century later, the fall of London remains the defining event of our era, remaining a catalyst for our understandings of ourselves even today. Our relationships, our technologies, our stories - all the apparatus of modernity rests on the firm foundation of our Victorian forebears. Even now is doubtless too soon for a full and unbiased view of the period; true critical perspective requires more distance than is yet achievable.

Nevertheless, the game is worth the candle. If our scattered globe is ever to come to terms with its future, it can do so only by coming to terms with its past…

_Needlessly vague and ill-described. Scrap this whole first section - delve into the action! You may safely trust that your degree committee is not only aware of the Grand Sanction but possess a working knowledge of the Empress’ London (and you certainly won’t impress them with a dramatic reveal of London’s Apotheosis, if that’s what you have in mind.) Enjoy a well-informed audience while you may. The rest of your scholastic career will be spent dancing around the truth._

….but from the general to the particular: before we ask whether the Nameless Doctor’s narrative is a truthful accounting, a piece of purest fiction, or some melding of the two, what of the letters themselves?

There are two hundred letters, in addition to various peripheral addendum, dating from spring 1898 through the winter of the following year - one of the last letters refers to the author enjoying the Festival of the Rose, which would place the final letter in late February 1899. Suggesting that the author spent a year and a day in the Neath would be rather too pat, but also entirely in keeping with his theatrical nature. 

_Addendum? Don’t keep us in suspense._

The precise ordering of the letters is, thankfully, clear from the dates - even the shortest missives have day and even time stamps. This was a common practice in the period, when the post service ran continual deliveries across London (in one much-quoted anecdote, postal officials all the way up to the vice-postmaster general were forced to resign for early retirement to Nuncio, when a single letter remained in its box for all of twenty-four hours). Though the Nameless Doctor is more than unusually obsessed with time…

_In this context, “more than” is quite superfluous. Beware needlessly repetitive prose._

_Beware, I say._

…regrettable that the letters we possess are from so late in the author's discovery of the Neath - his account of the New Newgate initiation process, his first uncertain explorations, would no doubt be of considerable interest. And as with all tales that incorporate Seeking tropes (barring only the most sentimental tales of returning seven-folders), the ending is per force unfinished. Still, what we have is not so as bad as it might be; the narrative begins shortly after the author's initiation as a "posy", that queer blend of the aristocratic, the criminal, and the simply notorious which supplanted the older monied classes in only a few short years after London’s Fall (the Esteemed Bungler’s ”Duancracies: A study of power politics from 1864 to 1899” remains, as ever, the definite source….

_Credit the fellow if you like, but I daresay you’ll be dating yourself there. Ask the Antiquarian Rocker about letting you have a look at the proofs for her next book - there’s a chapter about the pre-dating of paramount presences which ought to provoke some eyebrow-raising at the next faculty dinner._

The majority of the texts are written on "Mr Pages” sheets, the standard cheap but lasting mushroom paper of the day, and only slightly decayed by the acidic "squid" ink much in vogue in London at that time. The major exception is a series of thin copper plates, numbering twenty-three in all. These constituted the author's Nadir journal, for taking records in an environment notoriously antithetical to any such attempts. The first few have been copied over on paper sheets, with minor albeit sometimes insightful textural alterations. Stray comments in the text suggest that the author find the task of copying too enervating; nevertheless, the originals remain legible (and often trigger introspective phases in the associated letters.) Not surprisingly, the Nadir texts tend to be much shorter; several apparently feature a shorthand based not on any English system, Neath standard, nor the Correspondence, but a series of repeating circular motifs. These are unfortunately too few for any reasonable attempts at decryption, although I have included them in an appendix for any reader eager to try.

_Unusual, but you needn’t put all this in the main text; this is why footnotes exist._

Aside from these, there remain a few notes written on a variety of odder materials, such as the backs of envelopes or the insides of torn fungal cracker cartons. These tend to date towards the end of the period, when the narrator's funds and mental concentration are at a low ebb. One especially poignant item is written on nothing more substantive than a cheap (thankfully unused) spider-silk handkerchief, of the sort regularly stolen and discarded by the urchins of that day….

Of the party intended to receive the narratives, we have only hints (though nothing in the text supports an idea that she is the same Clara as the one so unfortunately involved in the contemporary moon-miser affair). Her mere existence becomes increasingly less certain as the text proceeds. There are times when it is presumed that she requires exegesis on the simplest points, others where the narrator presumes she knows at least as much as he does, if not more. Her role is almost stereotypically in keeping with the traditional Seeker’s inamorata (a term coined in Sir __'s ”Anaphora”, who identifies such characters with the pseudo-historical Lady in Lilac), although I disagree with his insistence on the purely fictional nature of all such narratives...

_Ah, tipping your hand at last. Odd place for it; I should rather you put this up front and centre. Bold disagreement will oft attract admiration, where timidity would only meet with disgust._

III. "Truth lies at the bottom of a well."

The inevitable question for any scholar of this period - how much of the narrative even happened?

Notoriously, the Bazaar induced a situation where truth was privileged as the only “legitimate" form of entertainment. The novel, which had flourished in England through the first phase of the Empress’ reign, all but disappeared in the years after the Fall; the most telling example of its disfavour coming when that well-known, greatly-beloved practitioner of the form, Mr Huffam, returned to his journalistic roots. The eventual revival of the format in the 1880s, repackaged as a light amusement for bored courtiers and time-weary zailors, was no match for the public dominance of neatly packaged touching love stories and zee-ztories. (Space forbids digression into the literary movements of other Neathy locations, fascinating as those were - though “The Wine-Merchant’s Folly” occupies a somewhat similar niche in Khanate literature.) Serving as both currency and entertainment, even contemporaries recognised that the market’s appetite for truth outpaced the available material- a situation not unlike that of the historical Pseudo-Geber, or the Deutero and Trito Isaiah…

_Again, a little obvious. Cleave to my course lectures by all means, but don’t feel you have to parrot them._

…as mentioned before, I consider it a mistake to regard the Doctor’s letters as merely another Seeker _suchenroman_ , even though the Ministry of Public Decency adopted this categorisation when archiving the letters (I shall be discussing the Ministry’s internal critique separately.) Our main plotline, to adopt the language of fictional critique, falls within the traditional form of Neathy travelogue, with the Seeker material only emerging in full force towards the end. But neither categorisation is truly satisfactory to describe our source text, despite certain surface resemblances; the work’s tone places it squarely within the genre of comci. 

Comci (the term deriving from a French expression of the period, almost immediately claimed by London’s Bohemian set) refers to texts that deliberately attempt to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality: an increasingly commonplace degeneration in the later years of the Reign, as London approached the Apotheosis.

_Degeneration is the wrong word for this. Mysticism would be just as accurate, and less derogatory. Remember, they had no helpful hindsight to inform them of the Apotheosis._

The ur-example of the format, the Sickly Scotsman’s novel-in-parts “The New Arabian Nights“ (1882), flourished in the absence of the official imprimatur, rather than with it (in another context, one might say “underground”). Like the earlier, better-known Mycologene school (but intent on stirring the jaded reader with horror, rather than love), these were brief, serial tales, designed to stand alone and yet build up a unified worldview for anyone with sufficient opportunity and patience to enjoy them en masse. Barred by years of custom and the Ministry’s tax stamp from offering up anything but strictly marked and manufactured fictions, comci stories pushed the limits as far as might be done in safety. If fiction, these tales prized nice, precise details to an undue extent; if fact, they were fanciful and implausible. The grotesqueries of the Doctor’s account - one man who is himself twelve men- the fragmentary nature of the letters - the narrator’s calm, dispassionate thoughtfulness as to whether he himself might be a Judgement - these are wholly typical of the genre. 

The narrator’s most telling example of comci is his recording of that phenomenon (which in our source text has been dubbed ”Improper London”) known in the literature at large as jati - those parts of London not under the direct control of the Bazaar system. 

_You mean, the Nameless Doctor has so dubbed it. Active tense where possible._

The wholesale fascination of the Bazaar for this period is nearly all-encompassing. There are endless volumes filled with the records of official currency exchange rates, but nothing about the underground arbitrage that must surely have taken place outside of the Bazaar’s scrutiny. We know everything about the Correspondence, and nothing about the “white speech” that took the place of polari for exchanging secrets away from the severe eye of Bazaar agents. Such accounts as there are that resist the overweening narrative, such as that of the Bored Harbour-pilot (1872) or the Dewy-eyed Butcher (1889) were written by those who deliberately excluded themselves from the Bazaar system; very few people were sufficiently intercaste to be offered the safety of a faction’s obscurity, while simultaneously trembling on the verge of posy status. But our narrator, whatever else he may have done, whether or no he existed, seems to have prized a catholicity of spirit in treating all beings as equals. Culminating, in the narrative’s closing letters, in the much-puzzled Rubbery uprising: the explanation offered for this mystery is improbable enough, but perhaps not more so than the actual events. 

Upon these grounds, the fame of the epistles will ultimately rest, though they have much entertainment value of themselves; two worlds intimately intermeshed, and yet so distinct that one might go weeks without consciously admitting the existence of the other….and a narrator who sought to bring together the oppressed and the powerful, in fellowship and harmony. Too rare a spirit for the Traitor Empress’s London; but then, too rare today as well. 

_Better. You’ve done the necessary research, you have a solid thesis statement; at this point it’s largely a matter of massaging your ideas into a functional text. Edit, edit, edit. Fortunately, you’ve left yourself plenty of time to do so._

_But good lord. Terribly optimistic for a Londoner, isn’t he?_

IV. "My predecessors. Wonderful people, all of them."

Attached to the source texts are notes of varying humours, attesting to the fact that the letters, far from reaching their destination, became a popular entertainment at the Ministry of Public Decency, apparently being passed down through several generations of clerks. (Owing to this practice, and the consequent trouble adherent upon a century of sticky fungal marmalade, the full text of a crucial passage regarding the protagonist’s relationship to the Flowered Fairgoer remains unavailable.)

Several of the personages mentioned in the letters are definitively historical, most obviously the associated diaries of the Tattooless Sailor. (At least one of the Ministry clerks considered this to be a clever workaround, supposing that the diaries were found to be an excellent hook for a more salacious sequel). These memoirs are well worth reading in their own right, though increasingly smug and shallow toward the end; the best parts are undoubtedly the Zailor's period of active employment on the Zee. Good living makes bad reaving.

Substantive evidence also exists for the existence of the Flowered Fairgoer, though not her shadow, for very good reasons according to this text. The notorious Scrolls of Saint Arthur referred to remain the holy grail of Seeker researchers; readers who would like further information are recommended to the excellent "Burning Marsh-Mired" (1964) by the Lamentable Historian. 

A final note - much of the prose appears curiously anachronistic, even by the standards of late-reign London. All I can say is that the narrator offers an explanation consistent with his story, that these records have certainly remained untouched since their post-Apotheosis removal to Cumbria in the early twentieth century, and that the Neath was, and shall doubtless remain, a very odd place. 


End file.
